Companies are increasingly using AI image generation technology to teach people photography skills. Last year, Google released a feature called “Camera Coach” on Pixel phones that guides users on framing and composition, and in July, Adobe released a new feature in its experimental camera app that uses AI to critique photos and suggest changes to captures.
Similarly, former TikTok employees Melody Chu and Jing Liu are releasing a new iOS app called Superpose that uses AI guides to teach people how to pose for photos.
Superpose is essentially a camera app. When a user takes a selfie or a photo of a friend, the app uses AI to generate four potential poses. Some of the poses are extravagant and can sometimes make this generation look creepy.
Users can save the generated poses or use the pose matching feature to try positioning themselves in the frame based on its suggestions.
Before founding Superpose, Chu held various product roles at companies including Meta, Nextdoor, Roblox, TikTok, and Slack. Meanwhile, Liu was a founding engineer at a 3D face scanning startup and later worked on image and video models at TikTok.
Chu said the idea for the app came from a personal problem. It was because her husband couldn’t take a good photo of her.
“My husband keeps taking terrible pictures of me. It was a really painful point in our marriage that I couldn’t understand why he always looked terrible at me. And I thought to myself, with advances in computer vision and generative AI, there must be a way to solve this problem. So I decided to stand up for myself,” Chu told TechCrunch.
Superpose was released in July and has been downloaded over 22,000 times to date. The company says users have created more than 190,000 poses. The app gives users 5 generations for free every day, but you can also purchase an additional 5-generation pack for $2.99 or 20 generations for $9.99.
Chu acknowledged that other companies are also moving into the AI-guided photography space, but said Superpose wants to focus on being the best camera for taking portrait photos following AI instructions. She added that the startup doesn’t want to get involved in creating AI backgrounds or images, but instead wants to focus on real-world photography.
“We want to get to the core of capturing memories, for example, rather than taking you to a fantasy place you’ve never been before. I think there are a lot of apps that already do that well, but we really want to focus on actually capturing lived moments and experiences,” Chu said.
She also acknowledged that some of the pose suggestions look creepy, and that the company is working on improving them. The company says it is working on improving generation styles, personalization, and ways to better coach users directly from the viewfinder.
Superpose has raised $2.2 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, Chinese smartphone and selfie app maker Meitu, and OVTR VC.
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